Sometimes "do things that don't scale" is bad advice. It's great advice when starting out (because you should be focused on building an appealing product before you worry about scaling it), but you need to be using your scale-up to test ways of breaking out of doing the "things that don't scale". The idea is to turn it into a forcing function for the company: if you can't find a better way to scale, you're done.
Disruptive innovation is about ripping out the assumptions that incumbents made and operating under a new set of assumptions that may not have been possible when the incumbents started. But sometimes, the incumbents' assumptions/constraints are still valid, and new entrants don't have as much of an advantage (or the new entrants' advantage is easily copied).
Comments
Sometimes "do things that don't scale" is bad advice. It's great advice when starting out (because you should be focused on building an appealing product before you worry about scaling it), but you need to be using your scale-up to test ways of breaking out of doing the "things that don't scale". The idea is to turn it into a forcing function for the company: if you can't find a better way to scale, you're done.
Disruptive innovation is about ripping out the assumptions that incumbents made and operating under a new set of assumptions that may not have been possible when the incumbents started. But sometimes, the incumbents' assumptions/constraints are still valid, and new entrants don't have as much of an advantage (or the new entrants' advantage is easily copied).
I think it's basically a contraction for "do things that don't scale until you get $50MM or whatever and then stop doing that."